Field of Steams

The texts here arranged concern the states and events surrounding an incident in 1871 which caused
the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge to permanently abandon its most expensive project to date.

Prevarious Criffin climbed the 334 limestone steps of St. Stephen's Tower without any degree of feigned or imagined exhaustion and stepped off the top of the building. His speed as he fell, unanticipated by those who had invented his present way of living, had a strange effect on the field that endowed his appearance. He started to double, as though seen with crossed eyes, then to triple and multiply. In almost every sense he himself was multiplied, not only his image. For the next few seconds he spread over the city like a flock of birds. At a butchery on Kean Street his woeful face fell through the chopping block beneath the meatman's cleaver. His sleeve and hand reached out for a pair of spectacles being wiped with a blue paisley cloth on the table before a third-row seat in the House of Commons. A working girl in Holborn was languidly rubbing herself in the bath when Criffin's star-shaped body passed instantaneously through her. Then he hit the saddle of a hitched horse and then the ground, a bungled lump of steel and brass, grabbed up quickly by a costermonger for sale as raw material.